October 26, 2011 
Today is Wednesday, right in the middle of a work week. I just returned from a week trip in China with my family accompanying 2 elderly parents. This is my brother’s unique way of gratifying a depressed, elderly patient who has just recovered from his gallstone operation recently. By fulfilling father’s wish in search of his parental origins in China, we believed that it was a way to encourage father to endure his life-threatening surgery. As a whole, it was a fun, adventurous and exhausting trip. If ever I have experienced a travelling miracle, this is it. A group of eight adults among them were 2 elders in their late 70s and 80s, and 2 middle-aged. For sure, we could not enjoy as much as other vacations because the elders were physically weak and certainly needed to make a routine of them in order to feel comfortable.
Added to that hilarious trip was my middle-aged, first-timer, eldest sister whose luggage was not delivered on time of our arrival. We all ladies were busy scrambling around the garment and grocery shops late that night getting some necessities for her to endure her first night in overseas. It was not something surprising us for those who used to run into those travelling misfortunes, but it was a trauma for one who had never encountered such a despairing experience before. Moreover, she had been looking forward to have a memorable trip with her siblings as we hardly had chances to get together for a long vacation away from home. Until the last day of our trip, when we were about to broad the flight home, she was still dealing with the aftermath of that. Yup, she did have an unforgettable trip overseas.
The pacing of the whole trip was slow and tardy. Some days, we had to abandon our notion of plans and schedules to the elders’ physical and emotional needs. We must dial our own needs way back just to make sure the agendas adjusted to the tired elders. Yet, we did not miss the joy and fun of strolling around the Shanghai city and seeing the sights of the West lake of Hangzhou. The most valuable part was in the whirlwind of activities trying to assist the progress of a group of clumsy travellers we learned how to adjust ourselves to make the group’s travelling a pleasant one.
“I love to travel, but I hate to arrive.” ~ Albert Einstein
Wai Ping Lee/Oct 2011
wpL 
The point is, in a perfect world it should be one and the same. My everyday life with the people I know and love should be as lively and enlightening as traveling can be so automatically. But of course it’s not. Sadly, I’m as bad as the next guy at living ordinary life in an extraordinary fashion. So, travel is always there to notch me up to the next level, where I ought to be living all the time. And if I put enough good trips together in the years I have left, I might actually live the life I was destined for.